In an interview on French news site Médiapart October 2, Rami El Obeidi, former coordinator of the NTC’s foreign intelligence services, asserted that “French foreign agents directly assassinated Gaddafi.” He said this was because of Gaddafi’s threats, shortly before France launched the war on Libya with NATO backing, to reveal secret donations he had made to Sarkozy in 2007 to finance Sarkozy’s presidential election campaign.

Obeidi added, “The threat of a revelation of the funding of Sarkozy in 2006-2007 was taken seriously enough for anyone in the Elysée to want Gaddafi dead very quickly.”

Shortly after the story broke, on October 1, Le Monde journalist Barbouch Rachid noted on a blog that the spokesman for France’s Foreign Ministry under the new Socialist Party (PS) government had refused to confirm or deny Obeidi’s allegations and related reports. Nonetheless, French officials and media have largely buried the story. On October 2, Le Parisien noted: “This weekend the French authorities have abstained from any comments on these revelations.”

On September 29 the Italian daily Corriere della Sera confirmed Obeidi’s assertions, writing: “Mahmoud Jibril, the former premier of the transitional government has…re-launched the story of a plot ordered by a foreign secret service. ‘It was a foreign agent infiltrated into the revolutionary brigade who killed Gadafi,’” he had told an Egyptian TV channel on September 27.

The paper quoted Western diplomats in Tripoli as saying that if a foreign agent was involved, “he was almost certainly French.”

On October 1 the British Daily Mail spoke of a foreign agent: “He is said to have infiltrated a violent mob mutilating the captured Libyan dictator last year and shot him in the head.”

It added, “In another sinister twist to the story, a 22-year-old who was among the group which attacked Gaddafi and who frequently brandished the gun said to have killed him, died in Paris last Monday.” Press reports identified the man as Omran ben Chaaban, a former 22-year-old rebel fighter who died on the evening of October 1. He was in several photos and videos of Gaddafi’s killing.

Available information suggests that he had connections to the French state and might have been the agent referred to by Obeidi. French officials took in Ben Chaaban after he was captured and tortured by Gaddafi supporters and shot twice in an attempt to escape. He was then transferred to a French hospital in September, where he died.

Obeidi said it was Syrian President Bashar el-Assad who gave Gaddafi’s satellite phone number to the French secret service and military in the first week of October, allowing them to pinpoint his location and monitor his movement. Then, “The French Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure [General Directorate of Exterior Security, DGSE, French foreign intelligence] carried out the execution.”

According to the British Daily Telegraph, Obeidi added: “In exchange for this information, Assad had obtained a promise of a grace period from the French and less political pressure on the regime, which is what happened.”

Obeidi added that a report by his intelligence service on France’s role in Gaddafi’s death was censured, “because Mr. Sarkozy controlled the policies of the NTC along with the Emir of Qatar.”

This is not the first time that allegations have emerged of French intelligence involvement in Gaddafi’s murder. On October 26, 2011, five days after Gaddafi’s assassination, the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, reported that “on Wednesday October 19 in the late afternoon, a Pentagon colonel telephoned one of his contacts in the French secret service…The American announced that the Libyan leader, tracked by US predator drones, was trapped in a Sirte neighbourhood and could not now be ‘missed.’”

In Le Canard Enchaîné’s account, the American official added that if Gaddafi got away, he would become a “real atom bomb.”

The Canard wrote that the White House had said, “We must avoid giving Gaddafi the international platform that a possible trial would give him.”